People

The Facility

The studios are situated on 17 acres of beautiful pastoral land that is half
forest and half meadow, with ponds, nature trails, and a variety of gardens
throughout. Designed by Wes Lachot, the buildings exemplify Frank
Lloyd Wright’s most ambitious goal: Organic Architecture.
In this design, which you will experience from the moment you enter the environment,
form and function are not only one, but were conceived and grew as one, naturally.

Using Nature as our basis for design, a building or design must grow, as
Nature grows, from the inside out. Most architects design their buildings
as a shell and force their way inside. Nature grows from the idea of a seed
and reaches out to its surroundings. A building thus, is akin to an organism
and mirrors the beauty and complexity of Nature.

The starting point of our design—literally starting from the tip of a freshly pointed pencil—was the service of music. Musical space grew out from that point, reaching the heights, widths, and depths proportionate to the full acoustic range of the concert grand piano, full-scale acoustic drums and percussion, and of course, ensembles. Daniel Lanois speaks to the benefits this approach:

There’s [] an automatic depth of field that you get by having 11 people playing together in a room. Every microphone is open literally to someone 50 feet away, who’s going to sound literally 50 feet away through the vocal mic. As a result, Time Out of Mind is dripping with ambiance. It paints such a picture that you can really feel the presence of people in the room, and that’s an exciting sensation. It’s like hearing a great Miles Davis record, where you know that everyone was doing it in the room at the same time.

By supporting authentic playing, authentic recordings come naturally. Which brings us to perhaps the most innovative aspect of our organic design process: the complete integration (and integrity!) of the art of recording. Our solution to this challenge was to define two fundamental environments, one optimized for analog audio, one optimized for digital video, and then to cross-link them so that they could work as a combined unit, or with one as master and the other as monitor, or as each operating on a completely stand-alone basis.

The Loggia and The Lounge

The Loggia is the Front Porch of the 4000 sq ft Main Studio and the gateway to the West and North Patios, beyond which the meadow, forests, and ponds await. The outside is never more than two door-swings away.

Staff Bios

In 1989, Michael Tiemann created a new paradigm for commercializing software. "Open Source" software revolutionized the software industry and paved the way for the popularization and commercialization of the Internet. Startups such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter owe their early success to the availability, functionality, flexibility, and quality of open source.

As a founder of the world's first open source software company, and later as an executive at Red Hat (NYSE:RHT), the world's leading open source provider, Michael has been invited to speak all over the world about open source strategies, technologies, and policies. The more he talked about how open source principles can be applied to problems beyond software—agriculture, conservation, healthcare, even water resource management—the more he thought about how these principles might be applied to one of his great passions: music.

As a boy, Michael sang professionally in Manhattan for four years and recorded four albums by the time he was 14. After his voice changed, he became an intense listener, spending hours on end listening to the great vinyl libraries of jazz, rock, and classical music. While the mainstream music industry has largely abandoned the great studios and the techniques that made these recordings so wonderful, Michael realized that this merely represented a new business opportunity. By combining old-school acoustics with modern audio technologies, a recording process that honors both artistic performance and audience experience can produce results as good or better than the earlier archetypes. Michael co-founded Manifold Recording to help modern-day artists achieve this goal.

Amy Tiemann, Ph.D., is an author, educator and multi-media producer. Through her books, podcasts, in-person workshops and online outreach, she has developed many ways to reach her audience. At Manifold Recording, Amy focuses on video production. Amy has two production niches: first, helping authors create new forms of media to provide new material to enhance outreach to their fans. A custom video or audio can provide expanded or customized training and can be produced much more quickly than writing a new book. Amy’s second producing passion focuses on creating new audio and video products for socially beneficial causes.

Her previous publishing experience includes both working with a major New York Publisher, Gotham Books, as well as independent book publishing. Her breakthrough book, Mojo Mom: Nurturing Yourself While Raising a Family, now in its second edition, catapulted her MojoMom.com movement into what is now one of the most popular online parenting resources. Visitors have logged more than 125,000 downloads of her Mojo Mom Podcasts alone. Her next book, Courageous Parents, Confident Kids was written in collaboration with 12 experts and benefitted from an innovative e-book launch that reached over 30,000 people.

Amy has honed her publicity and media expertise as a sought-after speaker and commentator. She is a frequent guest expert on parenting websites, national radio tours, magazines from Redbook to Glamour, and TV including NBC's Today Show. She loves radio and is a member of the Community Advisory Board for North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC.

Amy is thrilled to be a producer at a time when all forms of media and publishing are converging, and she looks forward to bringing clients' visions to life with innovative projects at Manifold Recording.

Grammy-nominated, twenty-year industry veteran Ian Schreier is the chief engineer and in-house producer/mixer at Manifold Recording and the Miraverse. Previously, Ian was a partner at Osceola Studios and founded Grooveworks Recording Studios. In addition, he has freelanced in such iconic facilities as Abbey Road #2 and the historic Columbia/Sony Music Studios in New York City. He has engineered, produced and mixed artists across a broad spectrum of genres—from pop, rock, blues and hip hop to jazz, a cappella, symphonic and classical music.

Ian was engineer and mixer on the Grammy-nominated That's Right (Alligator Records) by Roomful of Blues. He has mixed a number of albums for hiphop icon 9th Wonder, tracked Velvet Revolver for the Fantastic 4 soundtrack (Wind-Up Records), produced, engineered and mixed Annuals' major label debut, Such Fun (Sony BMG), produced American Idol's Anoop Desai's EP (All is Fair) and mixed the concert film/Thelonious Monk documentary In My Mind, featuring Jason Moran, as part of the Jazz Loft Project.

Along with his studio experience, he has also mixed live sound for Dixie Chicks, the North Carolina Symphony, Kenny Chesney, Jerry Lee Lewis and many jazz and rock music festivals. He is also a consultant for studio systems integration, design and construction.

Ian began his musical journey as a kid in D.C., playing the drums to old Gene Krupa records and blasting Pink Floyd and Queen through his headphones. He moved with his family to Detroit and eventually to North Carolina’s Triangle area. He became an accomplished drummer and recording artist before opening his first studio in 1997. In the booth and beyond, Ian has been a teacher and mentor to other artists and engineers.